Designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon; completed 1931 New York City, New York The Empire State Building is arguably the world’s most famous skyscraper, and has been since its completion in 1931. Although it relinquished the title of world’s tallest building in the early 1970s, the Empire State Building epitomizes the commercial skyscraper, a late 19th-century American invention that captured public attention and imagination around the world as a symbol of America’s rise to global economic preeminence. The Empire State Building was the brainchild of two men: John Jacob Raskob, former chief financial officer of General Motors, and Alfred Smith, former governor of New York. In the late 1920s, Raskob and Smith decided to build the world’s tallest building as a way to attract tenants to a midtown Manhattan site on Fifth Avenue that had been owned by the Astor family. They began to raise money for their building in 1929. Raskob and Pierre du Pont, the latter of the famous chemical family, were...